This is not the first time the nation has produced
dramatic economic inequalities. What are very wealthy people like? The
everyday world of work vs. values of democracy. How assumption of
self-interest leads to fear in the workplace. Freedom, the illusion of
freedom, coercion. Exploitation. Credit cards. Meritocracy. Sociopaths.
Corporations and the economic justification for the damage they do.
Historically we are emerging from an era with no clear ideology, but an era
in which materialism and business has expanded powerfully and
internationally, and out of the vacuum two old, discredited ideologies,
laissez-faire and Social Darwinism appear to be rising again in modern
guise. These ideologies are still flawed; the first (contained in modern
Libertarianism) vigorously promotes freedom but ignores justice and is
indifferent toward democracy. The second is supported by science, is
disinterested in humane values and accommodates exploitation as part of the
nature of things. The search for a modern economic theory closer to reality.
Is this a society of individuals rationally maximizing happiness? Andrews’s
view: at least among the disadvantaged, it is a political economy of hope
and fear. (1)

Looking for
morning news, I click on my computer. My internet service flashes with
color, the biggest houses, the biggest jewelry, the most expensive toys.

The internet’s
financial press waxes muscular.

Television is
the same. The media are a river of adulation for all this glitter and the
people who own it.

School
textbooks carry a similar message. Despite setbacks, the economy is ever
expanding, its power is unparalleled, we are now spreading free market
capitalism around the globe, bringing unimagined wealth and improvement to
mud-level nations and countries sucked out by socialism, raising everybody,
because that’s what capitalism does.

Has everybody
been raised here?

Actually, with talk of equality written into this nation’s founding papers,
the scenery never looks right. The contrast between rich and poor grows,
and this year has been no exception. As an acquaintance on the street puts
it: every year there are more homeless people and every year the limousines
get longer.

If the stated
goal of the system was to gradually create inequality, it might also claim
success.

We barely notice
because we are adjusted. But if you are a foreign visitor, how does this
nation show? A svelte Scottsdale, of course. Disneyland, of course. The
flamboyant homes of the film stars. Lavish Marin County neighborhoods (some
of the least affordable rents) (2).

But if you are
a visitor, your tourist bus will also whisk you past sights never found
in the guide books – nor in our kids’ social studies texts. Neighborhoods
awash in shootings (1,200 gun injuries in South Los Angels alone last year
(3)); square miles of city
filled with houses with barred windows, chaotic schools, downtown blocks of
sweatshops; whole neighborhoods sunk in semi-literacy, drugs, gangs, fear;
and our nightmarish jails (4).
Not everybody looks like they have been raised.

Imbalance

The numbers
show a radically skewed society. Rather than pages of numbing statistics,
I’ll sketch a couple of facts, the first from sociologist Steven Rose. If
you drew a line on a building three stories high to represent the distance
between the lowest and the highest family income, the average (median)
income sits at only 10.5 inches off the ground and half the nation is
clumped below that (5). Second,
despite the prodigious numbers of poor, housing for them is so scarce that
of the 3,141 counties in the United States, in only 4 can a person making
minimum wage afford a one-bedroom apartment
(6).

I believe this
imbalance mauls the national psyche because the media repeatedly show us
images of people and places from the beautiful upper stretches of that
vertical line. In the comparison, thrown at us daily, most of us lose.

This nation
equates decency with wealth and indecency with poverty. These media images
also create floods of anxiety. Being “less than,” being poor, carries a
stigma. Another sociologist thinks we are so materialistic, poverty now
actually carries the shame that cowardice carried in earlier, warrior times
(7).

Tinkering

And actually if
the economy is on fire, we have some funny facts.

The dollar has
dropped to a fraction of what it was worth thirty years ago. No amount of
policy tinkering has been able to stop manufacturing’s chronic decline. The
national trade deficit is at an all time high (meaning roughly, if it’s
foreign made we want to own it). Personal debt has reached swaggering
amounts. And bankruptcies have ballooned, now running 1.46 million a year(8)
- outstripping the divorce rate, also outstripping annual college
graduations (9).

Envy

Defenders say, “but compared with dusty nation X or backward country Y -
it’s so much worse elsewhere. We are the envy of the world.”

When we compare
nations, we should keep in mind who we are comparing. Every third world
nation has a middle class, no matter how small, with houses, and those folks
are still better off than our hordes of homeless. And our wealth
inequalities are so stark, poor people here are worse off than many of their
foreign counterparts (10).

And if you start
comparing nations, what about the quality of life? Are our 30 million
citizens on antidepressants also the envy of the world? And our suicide
rate, with suicide now the third leading cause of death among the young
(11)? Here lurks the question of how much life is worth living.

Curtain

I wish I could get away from these inequalities, but I cannot. Fly away from
it all? Board a plane, and we take off. Having settled in at cruising
altitude on a flight, surrounded by other passengers, I look out the sun-filled window and we float among the iridescent clouds and for a moment it
seems we are transcending the world's concerns. Then the stewardess
carefully draws the cabin curtain across the aisle between us and the
passengers in first class section. This act is noiseless and delicate. All
passengers’ eyes are riveted on it.

Revolt

Nowadays, nobody seriously criticizes the rich. Criticizing the rich doesn’t
make much sense if you think you’re going to be one. But it wasn’t always
that way.

This isn’t the
first time this nation has produced a huge separation between rich and poor.
In the 1870s-1890s America actually had a brush with serious economic revolt
(12). The trouble was started by
common farmers in the hinterland - stake holders in the new frontier -
dismayed that all their hard work didn’t deliver.

The Civil War’s
aftermath was a time of immense capital growth for some and hopeless
drudgery for others. Chicago and New York contained both wealth-aristocrats
in frivolously decorated mansions that mocked European aristocratic manors,
and on the other side, smoke-stained factories with legions of ragged
workers. In the rural South rich plantation owners lived in white-columned
country homes while paying barefoot field workers scrip they could only
spend at the owner’s store – contract labor working in endless debt. This
was the era of flamboyant corporation owners in top hats chomping on outsize
cigars, also the era of steep child mortality rates, pestilences that swept
the streets, misery and short life expectancies for the poor.

It was an era of unrestrained markets, the era of monopolists who
collaborated with each other in setting prices; little was illegal.

Following the
Civil War, there were a couple of different currencies in circulation, one
sinking in value and less reliable.

City banks
peddled mortgages widely on new farmland they had never seen. A new farmer
could sign on in either currency. Then a national money contraction
occurred, consolidating the two issues. Farmers took the fall. They were
left owing the banks up to twice what they had signed for. Believing in the
national promise that hard work brings wealth, they found they only worked
and lost money on their slow-producing farms, then worked harder and lost
more. Meanwhile, the banks flourished. They grew spectacularly. They argued
they were only being patriotic.

Bewildered,
farmers actually started trying to understand what was wrong by reading
books on economics. The result was a bitter understanding of ‘the money
power,’ of lenders rights, of monopolistic control, and of American credit
corporations as fortresses of wealth.

In desperation,
farmers’ cooperatives started up. They aimed for debtors’ independence. They
were made up of plain people seeking self expression. First in the South,
this movement swept across Texas, then the Western plains states, attracting
farmers by the thousand. Then they joined up with railroad workers who were
desperate over low wages and ruinous equipment and who were striking. Eventually
the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union spread far west and
north, and at its peak had over a million members. The Populist Party was
started. This new party was virulently anti-monopoly, and its hero was the
opposite, the poor-but-good worker. It successfully ran candidates for local
government, and then William Jennings Bryan, a Populist, actually won the
Democratic nomination for President. Bryan had risen from stump-speeches in
open fields to the political crest with firebrand oratory telling farmers
and workers they were “crucified on a cross of gold,” nailed to the
impossible demands of credit merchants, and the victims of a monied tyranny
(13).

The poor have always been demonized. But for the first time, in the 1890s,
the rich were being demonized.

Bryan lost the election to McKinley in 1896. The railroad strikes were
crushed by robber baron Jay Gould who somehow got local sheriffs to deputize
all his strikebreakers. Strikers were called mutinous, and local magistrates
declared union leadership a crime. Without Bryan rising, the Populist
movement suddenly faded. There was capitulation and disgust. People muttered
‘you can’t fight the nation’s banks.’ Some farmers even left the country and
moved to Canada. Corporate power rose everywhere again. Sentiment changed.
In memory, words like ‘the people’s’, and ‘progressive’, became tainted with
the shadow of socialism.

That era is remembered in history books. But it has been so diluted that
Populism is described as an agrarian movement, a protest. Omitted are the
rage, the oratory, the fires, the marches, the riots, the militia shooting
strikers.

I believe some
of the early conditions of that movement are reappearing. But today we are
mute. We are back to the dogma that whatever the wealthy do is good for the
poor. Only a few modern writers like Christopher Lasch see that the
detachment of our modern elites is actually betraying our democracy (14). Fewer writers, like Charles
Derber, are saying the moral decay in this country starts at the top (15).

Atomized

We live in a
peculiar era. There is said to be no ideology.

What is ideology? It is a visionary assertion of values, goals and aims. It
ties a people together, explaining what is bigger and more important than
each of us. It is part theory, part speculation. It urges loyalty.
Ideologies can be national, grand and visionary, or subdued and local. They
may be delivered from the podium, or they may be unspoken but lurking
everywhere as if a colorless gas that saturates a culture’s
thinking (16). An ideology can move a community to prepare for war, or
it can move a nation to peace; but it gives motivation and meaning, it
states the common good, and explains why the people must work together.
Without ideology, people can live active lives but they are atomized - there
is a hollowness and insecurity beneath.

Daniel Bell wrote a book The End of Ideology which says that in the
United States, ideology has dissolved (17).

Bell: Through
the last century - at least through the belligerent period of the two World
Wars and the 1950s Cold War - the United States had plenty to say about what
it stood for, also what it hated. Ideology was sharp and it was national.
But with the advent of peace, and especially with the decline of communism,
there was suddenly less reason to deliver thunderous speeches about why we
are here, what we are ready to die for - the speeches that bring urgency and
purpose and meaning to people.

We have drifted since the Vietnam era without an ideological rudder. We
exist in a kind of void, in which individualism flourishes, and narcissism,
ego, materialism, the pursuit of self, wealth, status and greed - but
nothing that moves the masses together.

Creeping

Predicting the future may best be left to crystal-gazers, but we can always
take hints from newly published books because they contain ideas that may be
influential for years.

Some new
publications are unsettling. Into this void, I’ll argue, are creeping two
quasi-ideologies. Actually they are not new. They are two old ideologies,
mutated, which are rising again.

First a popular
book which appeared in 2002. It describes a part of this society. The way
the author works is a new fashion and it is revealing.

Beyond that Curtain

Very rich people are hidden from us because they want it that way.

Naturalist
Richard Conniff uses sociobiology to describe the upper class. He has
patiently followed the superrich around (and these folks are above 'junior
wealth' which is about $5-10 million) and has interviewed them in their
natural environment.

This is the new
fashion, to explain what humans do because of their genes and their
evolution. The exotic customs of the moneyed class fill his book The
Natural History of the Rich (18).
Because he is a naturalist, he unflinchingly compares the people at the top
with the alphas (top members) of other animal species.

Conniff says the
superrich are an intensely narcissistic and competitive small group. They
arrange their lives so that wherever they go (Aspen, Monaco, Paris) they see
the same few hundred people. They are self-encapsulated. They regard the
rest of us as "irrelevant, uninformed, even subhuman," and they don't like
to talk to us. (One fabulously wealthy lady used her cell phone to call her
chief-of-staff who was in another country to call her maid to tell the maid
what to do next. The maid had a cell phone and was on the opposite side of
the room from the lady).

Conniff reports
that just like other top animals, the superrich are driven by the quest for
status, mating opportunities and dominance - except that the human version
constantly denies it.

Waste to Impress

Top-rungers also flout the basic rules of economics. While average folks
purchase more stuff when it becomes less expensive (supply and demand), the
leisure class prefers to buy stuff that is more expensive, even when
comparable stuff is available for less. The object is to dazzle. Sociologist
Thorstein Veblen identified that odd habit back in 1899 and termed it
‘conspicuous consumption.’ It’s waste in order to impress (19, 20). Conniff points out
animals do this too. The cascading tail feathers of alpha male peacocks have
no useful function. They are there to impress other peacocks - in fact they
are so conspicuous they practically prevent the bird from flying.

More biology: the way the superrich have isolated themselves for centuries
now qualifies them as a "pseudospecies". By hanging out and mating only with
their own kind, over many generations, they have effectively removed
themselves from the gene pool.

Top Baboon

Sociobiology is a fairly new division of biology. It’s been around since the
1970s. It holds that human behavior is genetically shaped, like animals
which run largely on instinct. It says our behavior is evolved. Sociobiology
has a younger sister, evolutionary psychology, which talks more about humans
than animals, but in the same way. Evolutionary psychology holds that our
daily routines and our choices are not nearly as spontaneous as we think
because our behavior and our emotions are determined by the long tracks of
natural selection. Both these disciplines are in their infancy. Both are
busily looking for parallels between animal behavior and our behavior to
show we are more instinct than we think.

So what Conniff does is to illustrate the dominant posturing of top rats
versus the belly-crawling of their subordinates, and the bluster of top
baboons versus the rump-presenting submissiveness of subordinates - and
compares it to the obsequious behavior of human underlings who attend to our
superrich. Dominance patterns in this species fit dominance patterns in
that. So for instance in both human and walrus communities, the top elite
have more. They copulate more, they get more of what they want, and they
guard more resources than they need. Conniff states: "Humans seem to be
'ethologically despotic,' like chimpanzees; that is, we have a natural
predisposition to hammering other people into submission." Except that in
human males this is expressed as a "single-minded determination to impose
their vision on the world" (21).

Hierarchy

Why do the rest of us go along with this? We can’t help it. A stare from
high authority throws us into rabbit-panic. Lower ranking humans throw
themselves into submission, even sacrificing themselves for their high
superiors. It’s all biologically evolved behavior.

Inequality is everywhere in the animal kingdom - even animals that can’t do
much else, such as chickens, are expert at knowing the ranks of all other
chickens. And a low ranking wolf will fight to the death for its pack even
while its daily life is made miserable by cruel tormenting from the animals
above it because belonging to a hierarchy is everything. According to sociobiologists, hierarchy chains us humans too. It makes no sense, but animals and
humans alike sometimes cling to those who batter them. It's in the genes.

Mayhem

Along the way,
it would be heartening to learn from sociobiologists that our top people are
good people. That part is missing. The ultra rich are likely to have serious
mayhem in the family history. Conniff traces this old saying to Balzac:
‘Behind every fortune there’s an undiscovered crime.’ Generations ago, many
alpha families originally ascended by force and illegal conquest - and, in
his interviews, often show themselves proud of it.

And what of
our popular belief the wealthy are that way because they work very hard? Do
they? Well, maybe. Conniff interviewed one extremely wealthy woman who told
him, "I'm the most normal, normal person, I'm not like most rich people. I
work really hard. Most rich people I know don't do anything but eat, drink,
sleep, pardon the term, fuck, and have a good time" (22).

Genius and Alcoholism

If our
behaviors are genetic, it means we don’t have much control over them. Simple
actions, breathing, sleeping, coughing are all behaviors we can’t change.
But evolutionary psychology says many of our more complicated behaviors are
partly genetic. We have a ‘genetic predisposition’ towards overeating or
dominance or addiction or depression, musical genius, alcoholism, and
possibly some criminal behaviors too - because these things have been found
to run in families. Today’s cutting edge research is looking for behaviors
that are controlled by genes, and how much. There is a scale called a
‘heritability index’ that runs from 0.0 to 1.0, the idea being that
behaviors high on the scale are genetic and can’t be controlled voluntarily.

Treacherous

The implications ripple across our legal system. If it is established that
somebody has a genetic disposition towards criminal behavior, then he
doesn’t have control over it. Think of the possibilities: imagine a criminal
lawyer putting on the following defense, “…Your Honor my client is not to
blame - he couldn’t control his thieving - he was just fulfilling his
genetic destiny…” In fact, these legal defenses may become more common as
evolutionary psychologist are now arguing that using pornography (23), not paying child support
(24) and rape (25 ) are in the genes.

Evolutionary psychology is deliberately pushing into public policy. The
appearance of a new book Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy and
Personal Decisions shows its intended scope (26).

Selfish

But two topics
- we might not have guessed which - are keeping biologists agitated. Are we
run by selfishness? And how important is the individual, as opposed to the
group?

This is the
way it’s coming down:

1.
Selfishness. Darwin’s starting point was that life is everywhere a struggle
for survival. If you want to survive, you can’t waste time helping others.
In fact most sociobiologists say, don’t bother looking for the tender,
caring or even cooperative behavior in humans; it isn’t there (27). But the central issue being
kicked around: is selfishness by itself sufficient to keep a group
surviving? Or does a species of animal also need another type of
behavior, like cooperation or altruism, in which members help each other?
One camp, the hard-nosed Darwinists, says yes to selfishness – that also
means genes-powered greed, genes-powered waste-to-impress (28) – and no to altruism.

2. Selection
between whole groups. Darwin said natural selection happens between
individuals. But what about selection between communities (and herds and
flocks)? This issue is so hot, arguments between sober academics almost read
like kids having tantrums. The point is this: if there is competition
between groups (communities) for survival, the winning group will be
stronger because of teamwork, which takes something like cooperation or
altruism between members. A group of only selfish individuals is weakened
from within.

And these two
issues go hand-in-hand. Orthodox Darwinists say, you don’t need to think
about altruism because there is no group-level selection.

Bogeyman

Daniel Batson writes on this debate. At this point, sociobiology is new and
unsure. It keeps issuing statements then correcting itself. Does natural
selection exclude group selection? Yes; correct that, no. Does natural
selection produce only selfishness? Yes; correct that, no (29). Actually this is not just a
scuffle under the stairs among academics. Because of Darwin’s assumptions,
all this threatens the very planks on which the theory of evolution rests.
So a lot of people are watching this fight (30).

When these
infant disciplines finally get their sea legs, they will bring home the
bogeyman of all questions, because selfishness and altruism are not just
behaviors, they are moral values. What’s really lurking behind all this work: is
our morality controlled by our genes?(31)

And who Cares?

Adam Smith cares. Recall that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations tell us
all people act in their own interest (selfishly) - and that is fine,
according to him since the whole community eventually benefits. Who does
this sound like? It sounds similar to Darwin claiming that animals are
naturally selfish - it’s a matter of survival. Both Smith, in Wealth of
Nations, and Darwin don’t truck with altruism. It would change the basic
assumptions of both of their whole theories. And we get the hint that
Charles Darwin and Adam Smith were singing off the same sheet of music.

Social Darwinism

So the appearance of Conniff’s book waves a flag. Any alliance between
biology and big money should keep us nervous. This alliance has a scurrilous
history.

A contemporary of Darwin’s was English philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer
was not only thinking on the same tracks, it was Spencer who invented the
term “survival of the fittest.” Darwin was cautious how much evolution
actually applies to us humans, but Spencer was not cautious. Spencer applied
“the fittest” to the wealthy (32).

Spencer became very popular with the monied classes towards the end of the
nineteen century. On the lecture circuit in America he said humans, like the
animals described by Darwin, are all in a competition for survival. This was
normal. For wealthy industrialists to exploit and discard hordes of the poor in
their factories was also understandable. The poor were the unfit. Nature was
‘red in tooth and claw.’ The industrialist was just hastening nature’s way
of weeding out the weak members. Spencer also said welfare - even charity -
was a bad idea. It encouraged the poor, who would multiply and spread their
unfitness. Overall, did the rich prosper at the expense of the poor? Of
course - and in the long run, Spencer said, this was good for a nation.

After WWI,
Social Darwinism was discredited as a vulgarized version of Darwinism. At
the time, communist ideology was flourishing in Europe, and the argument
that the workers were going to control everything was turning Russia inside
out like a glove. Socialism was on the rise in Europe, and America decided
to keep one eye on its poor. Pro-worker feeling grew and between the World
Wars, President Roosevelt built a more poor-friendly, worker-friendly
atmosphere, and started Social Security.

But it is now
sixty years since WWII, and times have changed again.

Won’t Sit Down

During this last
century, of course, many things changed. Science itself made vast progress,
reaching peaks, so that at 2000 it could point back at a moon walk, the atom
opened, the defeat of plagues as points on its startling ascent.

Today science
has tectonic credibility. It is unimpeachable. If a layman attacks science,
nobody listens.

But this topic, Darwinism, will not sit down.

Among the few
with credibility to question science are philosophers. Philosophers are
carefully trained in logic.

Con

Philosopher
Richard Perry, in the staid journal Ethics, quietly walks up and
kicks the struts out from under sociobiology.

Is it really
science? Or is it a con?

Perry shows the
logic under all sociobiology to be not the grid of deductive logic you would
expect in science, but only a patchwork of analogies.

Now there is a
certain use for analogies, but analogies do not prove anything, they only
show likenesses. The best use of analogies is in the persuasive arts,
oratory and poetry.

Analogy is the
warp-and-woof of sociobiology. That’s what they do, says Perry. If you want
to say humans are aggressive, describe the aggressiveness in rats – show the
similarities. If you want to prove humans territorial, talk about the
territoriality of mockingbirds - invite the similarities. And so on.

Perry says, but wait. Why these analogies in the first place? - There’s
something odd about circling around one species to make pronouncements about
another. Why are we studying animals to understand humans? Would you
investigate houseflies by studying blue herons? Wouldn’t that distort what
we already know about flies?

His article “Sociobiology: Science in the service of ideology” warns us the
logic is so bad, sociobiology should be embarrassed. It is more like weaving
a net with the study of animals and throwing it over humans. And it should
tip us off to ulterior purposes. We should look for what else it does.

Perry urges us to decline trust in sociobiology. It is engaging reading. But
it does what Herbert Spencer did. It tells us we don’t have to feel guilty
if we are brutal with each other - animals do it. It gives comfort to
perpetrators of social injustice (33 ).

Slave-making Ants

The next point
in this essay is that Social Darwinism, or some modernized variation, is
rising again.

Supported as a
science, our neo-Darwinism is fed by hours of exquisite photography on
Discovery Channel where we repeatedly watch hungry leopards stalk innocent
deer, fell them and gorge on their entrails hour after hour. (What car
salesman hasn’t watched, and said to himself, that animal lives in me, I can
use any method to drag down fleeing customers?)

Darwinism has a dangerous ally. Another twist in logic, which always
gate-crashes the party and says, if it happens in nature, it must be right.

But the problem
is, you cannot logically convert a fact into a right. (Example: it’s
a fact some kids beat up other kids on the playground, therefore they have a
right to do it).

Morality should
step in.

It took a long time to get that right in western civilization. Because it’s
a fact Charles Darwin reported on a species of slave-making ants, humans do
not have a right to make slaves.

Then as now,
using analogy as a justification for ignoring human pain and fear, or
creating it, is a perversion.

Place your Bets

Social Darwinism will be much harder to get rid of this time. If we are not
vigilant, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology will set new standards of
indifference. The implications are stirring. What if our politicians and
policy makers, administrative agencies and bureaucracies, our military, our
justice system, our legislators, watching, all believe that rich and poor,
good and bad, winning and losing are in the genes? Place your bets, because
depending on the way a couple of these controversies turn out (especially
selfishness) we may have biologists telling us what is right and wrong, that
democracy is unnatural, and that inequality and injustice are in the nature
of things.

Laissez-faire

Laissez-faire was the table-thumping cry of monopolistic big business in
the 1860s through the 1920s – overlapping the Populist era, but on the
capitalist side. From the businessman’s point of view, this was the Gilded
Age. Will power was a virtue, expansion always seemed the way to go, and
everything was believed to be better if it was bigger. (The Crystal Palace,
the Eiffel tower, and the Titanic were industrial symbols). The concept
traces back to 1825, and it means government abstention from interference
with individual action, especially commercial action.

But it was
found that if business was not restrained at all, the economy rose and fell
in a cycle of peaks and destructive crashes. Second, it produced monsters
that worked people to disease or death. During the laissez-faire era,
people died or got maimed on the job in perilous mines, foundries and rail
yards, getting no compensation (because, it was argued, they worked there
by choice). This is what the Populists battled. The battle was rough and
long, with repeated strike actions, and poverty and despair for workers.

Laissez-faire,
the philosophy of robber barons, was eventually collared and muzzled,
notably in Supreme Court decisions headed by Justice Brandeis who saw
unfettered business practices as an eventual threat to democracy. It took
many years to produce a real turn. The Seattle General Strike of 1919 was
another attempt to break through.

Eventually both
Social Darwinism and laissez-faire were abandoned.

Spirited

Laissez-faire
is rising again.

The Libertarian Party, formed in 1972, looks New Age-ish. Libertarians
promises a bright new beginning, the kind of thing that always attracts
young people with spirited talk about freedom from authority. In fact
libertarians almost never stop talking about freedom.

Libertarians believe this: Individualism is what a society is all about. The
promotion of self, and self-interest, life, liberty and property rights are
important. Businesses and markets should also be free from restraint.
Libertarianism hates constraint. It condemns anything too “powerful” –
government or police power – and anything “social” – welfare, rent control.

Here are its
founding assumptions. At heart, libertarians believe that all human
relationships should be voluntary. They think there is a natural harmony of
interests among people, and any society works by a sort of spontaneous
order.

In politics, libertarianism claims to be against both the left wing and the
right. It states opposition to fundamentalist religion as much as against
any state agency - both threaten individual freedom.

How do we know
the old ideology of laissez-faire is in here? Because a 1997 book
which explains the basics, by David Boaz (executive vice president of the
Cato Institute) called Libertarianism: A Primer, says so. It states
that laissez-faire capitalism is the answer to everything because it
brings incredible wealth to all. And it proudly champions Adam Smith’s ideas
as its heritage (34).

Justice in Two Pages

Those founding
assumptions are nonsense. First it’s obvious not all people are interested
in harmony. Some are excessively greedy. Some people prefer power, which
tends to corrupt. Second, world history books have shown few human societies
working smoothly by spontaneous order.

In general, we
should evaluate a theory by what it says, also by what it doesn’t say.

What does
libertarianism say about exploitation? Nothing. The word isn’t even in the
index.

Next, its
treatment of justice is negligible. And what does it say about equality? -
Almost nothing. It is hard to convey libertarianism’s disinterest in
equality. Or perhaps this: Boaz’s book has 314 pages. Just over one page is
given to equality. Equity? - nothing. Justice? - under two pages.

Consider a
modern concern. What about big-business abuse of the environment? Among
other points in the book - to give environmentalists nightmares - is that
libertarians see no contradiction between industry expansion and the
environment. Quote: “Economic growth helps to produce environmental
quality.”(35)

Reading
Libertarianism reveals something much more troubling. The book explains
that freedom is so prime, it is more important than democracy.

Libertarianism
is disinterested in democracy. Rather, libertarians believe in Natural Law,
laws seated in ancient, even tribal, crude customs, which are hardly
enlightened ways. There is actually a fringe element among libertarians,
gaining momentum, which seriously wants to dismantle democracy in America
(36) which it interprets as mob
rule.

While this
style of business in the 1890s, for profits, freely harnessed uneducated
millions of the poor into sweatshops and mills, at wages that always seemed
to keep them frightened and hungry, all those problems are now forgotten by
libertarians - as if the century had no shadow.

And without a
twitch of embarrassment, a Chicago Tribune review on the dustcover of
Boaz’s book Libertarianism explains that “these are ideas that are
coming to dominate the thinking of government all over the world.”

Tinsel

But
laissez-faire is critical for today’s aggressive corporations because
they cannot operate at their gargantuan level without almost total freedom.
Corporate businessmen cite as their biggest enemy, government. They see
greed as a solution rather than a problem. They despise the push for
equality as a death-knell. They refer to justice as something the envious
dreamed up (37). For them,
democracy is no more than a bright tinsel wrapping to be torn off the moment
it poses any real constraint to their freedom.

Bang

Despite these
concerns, our market economy is not weakening in any way.

The reverse.
At this point in history, capitalism is just getting started on a second Big
Bang. We are recently launched into another expand-or-die wave that dates
back approximately to the fall of the Berlin Wall and is already showing
geometric power. It’s being promoted by our massive gifts and loans to
foreign countries and by our placing key capitalists in international
banking. And, less benevolently, by the starting of foreign wars, which
require repairs, for which we provide contractors, whose profits return to
us.

This new wave
is not powered by any single ideology. But this odd combination of Social
Darwinism and laissez-faire is a soil mixture that produced the
explosive capitalism and empire-building at the turn of the last century,
and it will work again.

I say odd
combination because these two theories are actually contradictory.
Libertarians should look over their shoulders. Biology promotes the opposite
point, that we humans don’t have much freedom because our behavior is
controlled by our genes. Sociobiologists say even the functioning of our
societies is constrained by our genes, so the idea of us choosing to expand
our liberties is hilarious to them.

These two
theories were also contradictory a hundred years ago. That didn’t stop
monopolists then and it will not stop the high-octane business leaders of
today - none of whom are exactly intellectuals.

Exalted

Turn on the television and watch our national leaders talk policy. They
explain we are bringing our way of doing business to foreign lands because
capitalism brings democracy. We are the bringers of fortune, uplift,
goodness, opportunity and freedom for all - the best destiny humanity has to
offer.

Just because this argument is delivered from a podium bathed in rotating
lights does not make it true. It is also broken logic.

One of the main
events in capitalism is the creation of inequality.

We recall that
the two basic values of democracy are freedom and equality. They are the two
wings on which that exalted bird flies.

And we notice
these official speeches on foreign policy promise freedom, but they never
promise equality. We cannot export equality. You cannot give away what you
haven’t got.

Second, a point always omitted from these speeches is that capitalism comes
in different species. One type is authoritarian capitalism and it is
decidedly undemocratic. A governing power, sometimes a military dictator,
promises businessmen they will make astonishing profits if they just follow
his orders. This - the melding of business and state - happens to be one of
the elements of fascism. Another defining element of fascism is that
inequality is a virtue.

But free market
economics are being built everywhere. This is so powerful, it has the face
of a titan.

So we cannot do
it any harm, analyzing it. We have plenty of time to pull up our chairs, and
at our leisure examine its beating heart.

Corporations

The major
musculature of our modern free markets is corporations. They deserve
attention.

Corporations are collections of people doing business. Other types of
business entities exist, sole proprietorships and partnerships, but
corporations are surely the largest. (Some corporations are more wealthy
than some countries). They inspire joy in some people, fear in others.

Corporations have been harshly attacked in several books by investigative
reporters. For example, Mokhiber and Weissman’s Corporate Predators
andCourt’s Corporateering warn of the way corporations
influence politics (by shifting massive capital around) as well as the way
they take away our personal privacy and security. As a rule, they lack
transparency. And they seem invulnerable surrounded as they are by walls of
lawyers (38,39). Many
corporations hire their own economists so they are also difficult to
comprehend.

These books are a good and healthy part of the public’s reading. But these
attacks have made no difference.

One book,
however, written by a lawyer, may make a difference. It translates the
stygian legalese and economics into common language. The book is no less
frightening.

The author
reveals the corporate Achilles heel.

Bodies in Two Parts

Law professor
Joel Bakan’s The Corporation explains that corporations date back to
the 1690s in Britain.

From the start
corporations were peculiarities, being bodies that are split into two parts.
Directors and managers run the firms, but stockholders own them. And the
stockholders are an ever shifting bunch, being owners today, sellers
tomorrow.

Most
stockholders have no interest in how the firm does business. They only look
at the daily value of the stock. Since the only business of a corporation is
to make profit, this is a recipe for corruption, because the stock's value
can fluctuate on rumor and reputation, and a firm might grow wealthy on
lies, or by overcharging, or by selling a dangerous product, or by not doing
anything except issuing promises, and the stockholders are just as
delighted. Stockholders don’t ask questions.

Second, the
corporation has “a legal mandate to pursue, relentlessly and without
exception its own self interest” and this “regardless of the harmful
consequences it might cause others.” If along the way they have to pay some
fines for damage they have done, this is calculated into business expenses.
It’s all numbers. And since some corporations make massive profits, they
don’t flinch at paying out very large sums to people and environments they
have damaged very badly. And then return to do it again.

Anything that
is an unfortunate byproduct of making profit, such as stress, lives lost,
disease, broken laws, pollution, immorality, ‘collateral damage,’ grief,
disruption, riots, is called an ‘externality’ - because it is outside the
crisp equation for calculation profit and loss. Most of what we know as
morality and humanity are externalities.

This breakage can have enormous effects on the world. Corporations are
externalizing machines, says Bakan. Bulldozing through to more profits, they
routinely break stuff wherever they go and this single-mindedness has
produced what we have today, colossuses of indifference “of such power as to
weaken government’s ability to control them,” so that “corporations now
govern society perhaps more than governments do.”

Yes, there are some corporation CEOs who exercise morality and judgment. But
they are not supported by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, who
believes the only moral duty of the corporation is to put profit over social
and environmental goals (and business guru Peter Drucker thinks likewise).

Bakan goes further. He likens corporations to psychopaths (sociopaths). For
his book he interviewed Dr. Robert Hare, a psychologist and expert on
psychopathy, to get a list of personality traits that psychopaths exhibit
(no empathy, asocial behaviors, manipulativeness, no conscience, no remorse)
and then tries those out on corporations. They fit. For instance
corporations return repeatedly to make profits from things they know are
lethal and that strew grief - cigarettes, cars that catch fire in crashes,
drugs with devastating side effects - because the money is there. Enough
money gives them a “psychopathic contempt for legal constraint.” Or any
constraint. Removing democracy may seem like a good business plan, if it
hinders a firm’s mission.

In corporate culture there is an emerging social order that is wide and
dangerous, as dangerous as any fundamentalism, Bakan states. “For in a world
where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for
profit, everything and everyone will eventually be.”

Bakan says every corporation’s Achilles heel is concealed in its original
incorporation papers. I will return to this point in the later section on
remedies (40).

Odd Folks

If corporations are really like that, we might wonder about the people who
work in them. Tens of millions of regular folks work in corporations, of
course, which gives them the surface look of well fed averageness. But
because of their aggressive business agenda, they also attract some odd
personalities.

Psychopath

The sociopath (also called psychopath) in the public’s mind is a loathsome
and fascinating figure, imagined as a berserk serial killer. Actually, most
sociopaths couldn’t be more different. Suave and charming, manicured
starters of conversations, many look like they come from the pages of GQ.
(There are plenty of lissome women sociopaths too.) Consummate actors, you
melt when they talk to you. They are smooth as glass. They exhibit a tapered
arrogance. They are also “persistent, repetitive, remorseless violators of
the rights of others, and the rules of society” (41).

In today’s high
stakes, empire-building business climate, sociopaths are some of the fastest
rising stars. In corporate maneuvering they have no loyalty, virtually no
emotion, and no conscience. Promiscuous in friendships as in sex, they start
instantly and leave an alliance instantly it creates advantage. Their
specialty is stirring and steering feelings in others without being touched
themselves. Usually the epitome of self control, they are capable if
cornered of sudden viciousness. Few will challenge them, sensing that
underneath is their calculated enjoyment of the destruction and humiliation
of others.

This is not a
new type of personality. But in modern culture, where success has become
separated from honor, they thrive. The sole passion they have is to win.
The particular combination of sociopathy and high intelligence is a
prototype for business success.

Harvard’s psychopathy expert Martha Stout estimates about 1 in 25 people are these
indifferent, charismatic liars and the proportion is growing. You may have
one at your picnic; there was one in your classroom at school; at one time
you probably tried to date one.

Stout sketches
a prototype sociopath growing up. He came from a privileged city family and
stole from his parents. He enjoyed stuffing live firecrackers down frogs’
throats. He was so intelligent he cruised through college almost without
studying and, graduating with an MBA, he was quickly hired by a large
corporation, where he proved he could sell anything. “Lying comes as easily
as breathing,” and despite subordinates complaining that he is insulting and
vicious he starts on a meteoric ascent, marries a sweet, quiet woman, and
before middle age is given a division presidency. He makes many millions of
dollars for the company and enjoys his female subordinates as sexual
plunder.

Stout explains that the brains of sociopaths work differently. Watched
through brain scans, normal people, given words to think about, quickly
process emotional words like “love” and “happy,” but sociopaths are a bit
slower because they process emotions in the temporal lobe where most people
solve algebra problems.

High Mating Effort

Stout also
says there is a genetic base. Sociopathy runs in families and is partly
hereditary – she estimates about 50 percent of it is inborn (42).

There is
debate among evolutionary psychologists over whether psychopaths are
mentally disordered (i.e. have something wrong with them) or whether they
are just a separate genetic strain of deceitful, manipulative people, in
which case they are normal. If it is a disorder, psychopaths are notoriously
difficult to treat (they don’t voluntarily come in for psychotherapy, and if
required to, they don’t change). Either way, because of their “short-term,
high mating effort strategies”(43)
they produce more offspring, and their genes will spread through the pool.
From an evolutionary point of view, this type is becoming more common.

Intimidation

Our culture is unwilling to stop them. We furiously promote these smooth
surfaced, antisocial people when they turn their talents to making money for
the company. Then as CEOs and CFOs we give them extraordinary business
power. In that position, the law supports them, because (as above) current
law says the corporation has “the legal mandate to pursue, relentlessly and
without exception, self interest, regardless of the often harmful
consequences”(44).

Wrap this all
around in the ruthless ideology of Social Darwinism, and nobody is safe.
Democracy itself is not safe.

Democracy is something a sociopath loathes, because it represents public
constraint by ‘little people’ on his autocratic power. And he doesn’t
practice democracy inside corporate walls. What he often practices in the
corridors and boardrooms is coercion and intimidation. Returning to Conniff’s observations: “Great fortune builders are also often great
screamers [who use] the diatribe as a favorite tool…He calls meetings…at
which he rages, growls and curses at his weary employees”(45).

Why is this
type so successful? One possibility: because these malignant personalities
are at home in the system. And the reason for that is that the system is
malignant.

History
contains several examples of sociopaths who have flattened democracies.

Red Ink

Here are some other odd personalities who appear in corporations, as
described by Jean Hollands, a business consultant who can calculate the
dollar loss due to a valuable employee’s bad behavior.

Large corporations sometimes hire high-ranking specialists and managers who
come with personal problems which wear everyone down. These people are not
just occasional curiosities; they can be found in every large organization.
Company owners are aware of these scabrous personalities under the roof, but
are startled to find out just how much they are draining the company since
their styles affect many other people.

Hollands shows the owners the company they could be making hundreds of
thousands of dollars more profit if they got rid of these misfits, but they
don’t, partly because of the expense of firing and rehiring.

In her book
Red Ink Behaviors she gives illustrations. The Intimidator (loud,
domineering, abusive, throws tantrums, but somehow thinks he is funny), the
Stressor (severe workaholic, spills her chronic frustration over coworkers
in sarcasm and unending interruptions), the Micromanager (requires written
reports at every turn which he examines line by line, is chronically
overwhelmed by all this work), the Withholder (has data necessary for
operations which she will not share, chronically late to meetings or
absent), the Inconsistent (thin skinned, high drama, unpredictable
hysteric, lapses into stream-of-consciousness communications) and the
Techno-specialist (brilliant but won’t talk to anyone who’s not a
technician).

These personalities are not easy to confront. They are extremely judgmental,
to the point of mild paranoia, and if confronted they turn rabid or wall
themselves up in their offices which is devastating to company morale,
creating ripples of anxiety across the cubicles. And because coworkers
usually back away from them, the offenders interpret this as a win, and they
do it again. Hollands points out that this event, “winning,” is highly
valued in high-stakes businesses (sales, legal, brokerage) where competitive
individualism is prized, so nobody is sure what to do. So the toxic
atmosphere spread by these bullies is borne, and everybody dreads going to
work (46).

The Street

Adam Smith
never talked about these odd personalities. Adams Smith’s main point is that
humans are naturally self-centered, and if you allow all people to work in
their self-interest, the nation will benefit.

But individual
self-interest will not explain everything. You cannot build a successful
economy with something like self-interest any more than you can toss a bunch
of boards in the air and expect them to come down in the shape of a house.
Much is missing.

Which means a
search. Requiring a long journey through rarified concepts? No, I believe
the search will take us places we already know. And I am swayed by Nietzsche
and his habit of scorning academics who want to make things complicated. The
great problems of this world, he said, are not in misty metaphysics. They
are in the street. Particularly they are in places we don't expect.

We don't care to look down. Is it because that direction is filled with
nothing interesting?

The media seems
to affirm that. Apparently, time spent on the lives of workers would be
gilding a vacuum. If we follow the media, we will always look up.

That is why we
are missing answers.

Organic

A tree’s height
and its depth are connected. Everybody accepts that because the tree is an
organic whole. A building is another kind of organic whole, and if the
building is built taller, its foundation must go down. But libertarian
economists refuse the heights and depths of our own society to be connected
– yes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but that is somehow a
coincidence because everybody is free.

In the life of a tree, what happens below determines what happens above. And
I believe if we want to understand how an economy creates such high levels
of wealth, we will need to look at its soil, and below, even if it is not
pretty where the roots are coiling and clenching the rubble.

What do we hear
when we hold our ear to the soil?

Work

We can start
with the broad question. Why do we work? It is a fair question.

We want to jump
in: “To earn a living,” “To support the family,” “To get ahead.” - All
partly true, or true for some people.

Actually the
broader question stumps professional analysts. The cover story of a 2003
issue of US News and World Report titled “Why we work” wanders around
for several pages and is simply evasive, but says: “Some do it for love.
Others do it for money. But most of us do it because we have no other
choice.” (47)

That doesn’t
sound like the freedom shouted up by libertarians.

Worksites

The goal of businesses is product and profit. If American all produced
something new in their work, we would be a prodigious and much happier
society. In fact, worksites are often not what we would expect. Huge amounts
of work effort are spent overcoming inefficiencies. What inefficiencies?
Workers often spend hours trying to find, cleaning up, checking, losing,
leaving messages, not connecting with, misunderstanding, delivering to the
wrong place, catching up, waiting, repairing, clarifying miscommunications,
correcting mistakes - myriad forms of blather and delay – and all exhausted
at the end of the day.

So answers to the question “why do we work?” like, to make, or to produce,
are part of the myth of work, but to get a little more reality we need to
look at things the textbooks don’t talk about.

A part of the answer is supplied by what happens at work.

One thing that
never fails to happen on the job is hierarchy. Hierarchy is ever present in
manufacturing, service, private, government, military, civilian,
inside-work, outside-work, unsuccessful, successful, full time, part time,
day, night, sea, land, intense and indifferent jobs. It is much more
predictable than - much more reliable across worksites of different kinds
than - money, motivation, service, satisfaction, effort, efficiency, profit
or product, which vary.

What hierarchy ensures is control. (The US News article does point
out that although more workers are using their homes, it is no escape from
hierarchy - and the phone and emails don’t stop after 5:00 p.m.)

Wage

So if I go to work for someone, I will enter some sort of hierarchy. And if
I go to work for someone, somewhere, I am also selling my personal freedom
for a wage.

So most work
sites create the opposite of the two basic values of democracy, which are
freedom and equality.

This is a dark
pond into which nobody ever tosses a stone.

Cheery

Should we say, the more people working, the more satisfied the nation? That
would be nice. But realistically, the more people work, the more people are
enmeshed in a system of control which is nondemocratic. That’s not such a
cheery thing to say, but we are tired of having the world made cheery by the
method of painting our windows blue. If we want to see better, we will have
to scrape it off.

Quest

And these
topics do not make easy conversation with our co-workers. At this point in
our search we’ll meet with a lot of silences. We verge on taboo.

Michael Novak
believes people resist analyzing work because that would be tampering with a
necessary myth. We might find contradictions. Any contradiction would
threaten society’s foundations. The value of hard, competitive work is
our society, Novak says. It is painstakingly reinforced from birth and
“without that myth our society is inconceivable.”(48)

The origins?
Generation after generation of young persons are taught that work is the
route to personal dignity and worth. For each child this is repeated in one
form or another through school and a light is turned on. Success and failure
is everything; no ambition is too high. These myths take a deep hold; they
have the spiritual power of hope, and by the time a school graduate enters
the workforce he is ready for something momentous to happen.

So each worker
starts out on a personal quest. If he talks to other workers about his
dreams of growth and expansion, they smile, and later he notices old workers
at his job doing much the same work and he starts to think, and to keep his
inner visions quiet. Gradually he sinks into routines. He dodges the
inanities and politics of the workplace. After many years, that inner light,
once supple and strong, is changed. Work doesn’t change much. If the child
originally dreamed of being in the NBA or being an explorer, working in an
office will feel like a cul-de-sac. But he does the work. He becomes a
watcher-of-others. Later perhaps he still has hope, but it is in a different
form: now he is darkly working on a distant hope of vindication. Even later
he changes again. Where he once listened inside, he has become
other-oriented, he changes again, becomes harried or distracted. He works
because of obligations, or for security, or for the company. If the light
goes out, this is the way he will finish his days, in routines, swimming
with all the others, in these vast pools of irrelevant direction. (49)

He was from
the start harnessed to somebody else’s dream.

Nonetheless,
as this person grows up he will stir the same myth in his own children.

Snappy

This wreckage
of myths is where we do not want to look.

Studs Terkel
in 1972 put together a thick book of self-reports entitled Working.
He interviewed workers of all kinds, from proofreaders to nurses, to
stockbrokers, to hookers, to jockeys, to welders, to executives, to stone
cutters, to accountants, to dentists. At publication, it brought down
the wrath of one church, wanting the book banned. Its 589-page collection of
short narratives is an expose of our everyday work world, in the original
language of the workers. This is the introductory paragraph:

“This book, being
about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well
as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting
matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking
the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations.
To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great
many of us.”(50)

This doesn’t
match Adam Smith’s snappy view of the workaday world as busy pin factory
workers and energetic vendors hauling goods to market, like bees in a hive.
So is it lies?

If Terkel was
the only writer, we might come away thinking he's a hothead. But he’s not
the only one. More recently a woman from the academic elite used a different
method.

Climbing Down

In 1999
Barbara Ehrenreich, who holds a Ph.D. in Biology, tried an experiment. She
changed her clothes and climbed down the social ladder to be a person living
on minimum wage. This level of society is called the working poor. Being
trained as a scientist, she took careful notes. She detailed her experiences
in the book Nickel and Dimed. One after another she took six jobs,
for a minimum of a month each, including waitress, hotel maid, house
cleaner, nursing home aide, and WalMart salesperson. She drove a car, but
made herself live each month only on what she could earn – mostly at $6 and
$7 an hour. This meant living in the cheapest lodgings (trailer parks,
motels, downtown hotels) and eating on a narrow, bland diet.

The jobs were
available. Once on the job she was an exemplary worker. But her first
finding was that it is almost impossible to work for those wages and
survive. For instance, monthly earnings as a waitress in Florida were
$1,039. The cheapest rental she could find was a $500 efficiency, and food,
gas, laundry, utilities and phone and toiletries came to another $517, leaving her
$22 for everything else. She moved to Maine, hired out as a house cleaner,
scrubbing young yuppies’ houses, making $6.65, and paying $480 rent for a
room, and so on.

Her second
finding was that the jobs often involved exhausting effort, and overtime,
and in some jobs she literally worked by the sweat of her brow so that all
she wanted to do at night was watch TV over her dinner and then fall asleep.

Specimen

She became socially invisible - interacting with nobody except her immediate
supervisors and coworkers; she felt ‘disappeared’ from society. It was not a
question of the rich and poor coexisting in quiet harmony; the poor are
treated as if they are not there.

She endured
humiliation, abuse, and routine violation of privacy, and sometimes had to
surrender basic civil rights. As a waitress she was told that her purse
could be searched at any time by management. There were rules against
talking on the job. Constant surveillance, being written up by the shift
supervisor, and being ‘reamed out’ by managers were all customary parts of
the job, also being subjected to drug tests (which in some cases included
stripping to underwear and urinating in presence of a specimen collector.)
After a while, she felt she was not just selling her labor but her life.

Ehrenreich muses that since the people she was around were all hard workers,
there seemed no purpose to the authoritarianism of managers except to create
a culture of extreme inequality. Demeaning employees sometimes seemed
attractive for employers. The repressive management style also produced the
feeling of failure and shame, which, she suspects, keeps down wages because
eventually workers think so little of their own worth that they accept the
low pay.

Ehrenreich is
one writer who has paused by this thought. We have a massive cultural
contradiction. "We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s
preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half
their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.”(51)

Meritocracy

To our Western
minds, some kinds of inequality are less tolerable than others, less ‘fair.’

Actually there is no human society with perfect equality. All cultures
contain some inequality and the big question is the criterion, because some
reasons for inequality are seen as unjust. For instance America thinks
monarchy and inherited aristocracy are wrong, but in neighboring Canada they
are accepted. In some communities, rank is based on brute strength, in
others, pureness-of-heart. Nobody likes to be low in any hierarchy.

Societies with inherited rank also find it’s inefficient. The British, for
instance, used to give all their top government jobs and high offices to
relatives of nobles. The problem was a lot of the nobility and their
relatives are not very bright. As a society grows more technological it
needs more pure intelligence to run it. So a century ago, the British
started awarding important positions by qualifying exams and educational
achievement, open to anybody.

But there’s a
benefit to being in a hierarchy by birth: being low is not your fault, and it’s not a
moral problem.

In America the
idea that anybody should be able to rise is old, and a person’s position has
always depended more on ability and accomplishments. This is meritocracy.
Meritocracy seems more democratic. It is appealing because it seems to be
all about self-steered destiny.

But by the same
token, meritocracy introduces blame for low rank. If you haven’t accumulated
accomplishments during your life, your low rank is a moral problem because
you were free and you had the chance.

In America,
therefore, the rich are better, the poor should be ashamed.

All this creates
a special set of fears called “status anxiety” by de Botton (52) and “fear of sinking” by
Kilmer (53), an obsessive
concern with social status.

Debt

After all that work at minimum wage, Ehrenreich experienced how it was easy
to spend your working life sinking deeper into debt.

Economic indebtedness takes away some of your freedom, but many people who
are affluent don’t understand money traps, so here I’ll spend a few words on
a topic that is technically on the consumer side.

Perhaps this will all fall into focus leaf by leaf.

Credit Cards

After decades of aggressively distributing credit cards to virtually anyone
who can sign, lenders have worked themselves into a paramount position of
power. Now the average person is obligated at about $8,500 in debt. Lenders
can charge interest up to 30%. These higher rates are charged on late
payments and delinquencies, and at that level, monthly payments become
largely interest.

Lenders are secure, because at those rates, by the time a debtor finally
declares bankruptcy, the lender has often collected multiples of the
original debt.

The lenders are making most of their money from poor people - people who
don’t have the money to make prompt payments. Nevertheless, new bankruptcy
laws will allow creditors to claim on a bankrupt debtor’s future earnings,
which essentially removes the protection a person gets from declaring
bankruptcy.

Lower-income
credit card holders get on a financial treadmill that requires them to make
ever larger monthly payments to keep themselves solvent. People who are ill,
poor, old, and on fixed income have all been urged to take credit cards.
Then they are largely sealed onto a wheel which never pauses.

Usury

Debt payments are the scourge of the poor but this is a spreading problem
and it now includes the middle class.

Many countries
have usury laws that control predatory interest rates. In Europe these laws
date back centuries. In the United States the laws vary from state to state.
Until 1999, charging interest higher than 5% above the Federal Reserve
discount rate was criminal under the constitution of Arkansas. But some
states have no usury laws, which is why powerhouse Citibank relocated its
credit card division from New York (interest cap 12%) to South Dakota, and
from there works an interstate credit card business charging as high as the
market will bear. Today’s trend is for states to loosen their usury laws to
attract more banks.

Public opinion is gathering against these lenders. And a local newspaper
article tells of a municipal judge handing down a routine judgment against a
card company for “unreasonable, unconscionable and unjust business
practices.”(54)

Is collecting high interest rates on loans a hard-work method of making a
lot of money? Hardly. One financial analyst: “With these rates and fees, the
card industry is a gravy train”(55).

Tweakers

What about the people who declare bankruptcy? Aren’t they gamblers, system tweakers, profligate spenders? Rarely. People usually go bankrupt because of
severe misfortune. Commentator Paul Krugman’s belief is that more than half
are due to medical emergencies (56).
Actually a Harvard-based study by Warren and Tyagi, the ongoing Consumer
Bankruptcy Project, shows only 13% of bankruptcies stem from credit card
overspending or from covering bad investments, or the like. Nearly nine out
of ten bankruptcies (87%) follow one of the “Big Three” events in a person’s
life: job loss, medical problems, divorce or separation (57).

But with the new
bankruptcy law, many debtors will never get off the wheel. Krugman fears
America is gradually returning to a “debt peonage” society, after a practice
in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for
creditors.

Whispering

For the past few years our national leaders have encouraged us to believe
our national destruction is imminent at the hands of an evil foreign enemy.
Possibly before that, legal loan sharks will eat us out from within.

Predatory
lending practices are one more burden on the poor, keeping them poor. It is
very hard for the exploited to escape shame and inescapable debt is one
reason for the melancholy that haunts the lowest regions of this society.

If you can make wealth through hard work, you can also make it by getting
others to do the work for you – even children get this insight.

Getting other
people to work for you is using them. Whether using people is immoral is a
debatable question.

If somebody is
willing to change a flat tire for me, I am using that person. Nobody sees
anything wrong. But isn’t that exploitation?

Actually, says
ethicist R. J. Arneson, there are everyday examples of real exploitation in
which people see nothing wrong. Children exploit their parents for trips to
the mall and money to spend. Parents exploit their children getting them to
do household chores. So it seems exploitation is not always bad. Arneson
says the word exploitation has two meanings (1) simply to use somebody – no
problem, but (2) if you use them and mistreat them in the process, there may
be a moral problem (58).

Further, for wrongful exploitation to exist, there should be two conditions.
First, the mistreatment (an injustice); second, the person cannot leave. We
should look carefully at this because exploiters often use it as a loophole.
But together, mistreatment plus no freedom to leave amounts to oppression.

Again, history is replete. No culture has been free of it, and the revolts,
revolutions, mutinies and reformations found in the pages of history books
are all accounts of oppression and its overthrow.

But whether exploitation is wrong continues to be argued. Sometimes
exploited humans do nothing but adjust. What if the oppression is accepted?
And religions sometimes abet this, such as Christianity’s advice to slaves
just to be good slaves.

Aberration

Karl Marx was the first to open exploitation for economic debate
(59). After a brief summary of
Marx’s points, I’ll touch on some modern theories.

Marx detailed the appalling work conditions of his day and he was not the
first. Ferguson (60) Ruskin
(61) and Dickens in his classics
also portrayed workers at mind-destroying work in thundering foundries,
weather-torn fields, slippery meat houses, 14 hours a day, six days a week,
and forced overtime; all for trickle-thin wages, and all accompanied by
routine abuse from foul overseers, capricious fines, and often, at these
wages, only floor space to sleep and bread and soup to eat and ragged
clothes – in all a bestial lifestyle; but in all the same, across cities and
farms, workers were paid just enough to survive. (Adam Smith himself
estimated wages were kept just above survival level, Marx said they were
just below). And since the employers also owned the rentals and the stores,
the money workers made frequently went back into the same pockets it came
from and the laborers found themselves in a trap from which they could never
rise.

Here’s the way it goes, Marx said. Laborers produce things. Being poor they
can only rent out their labor. They have to use their employer’s tools or
land or raw materials. The product of their toil is taken from them by the
employer who then sells it for as much as he can, and turns round and pays
the employee as little as he can in wages, because the difference is profit
and the mission of capitalists is to maximize profits. Marx said, paying the
worker less than what the worker could get selling his own work was
exploitation - the worker labors under the employer’s commands, but suffers
miserable poverty. This, Marx goes on, is not an aberration. It is a routine
part of capitalist operations (62).

Marx could discuss everything capitalists talk about; profit margins, the
utilitarian greatest good, risk, stockholders, overhead, economies of scale
and the expansion of industry. But he picked up the whole situation by a
different handle. He said, exploitation is immoral.

Capitalists protested, work is a free exchange. The workers are in our
factories by choice - so where’s the oppression?

Marx said in practice the workers are not so free to leave because the
wealthy owners of factories and farms across the land roughly match each
others’ wages and rents. So in practice the worker can do no better by
moving. In all, labor is sealed into a large closed system. The system is
oppressive. It is also to the benefit of the employer class, who do very
well.

Energetic

If you are forced to work, that is called coercion. Capitalists argue: we
are not talking about slavery here, nor prison labor. Signing on to work
with us is a consensual act. Marxists throw back: but these workers are
constantly in debt due to your starvation wages, and this amounts to
economic coercion because each person is obliged to try to clear his debts.
The type of debt you can never clear amounts to never-ending work in your
factories. Where’s the freedom?

And another thing, Marx went on. Notice how property ownership is connected.
The exploiters have the factories and the tools, the exploited don’t. Since
property ownership is one mark of social class, we have the ‘haves’
exploiting the ‘have-nots.’ Marx asserted this: property itself is a moral
problem. And since the property-ownership system is wholly supported by the
law it’s not going to be easy to change.

Marx builds his points up: Property is not a guarantee of personal freedoms,
as the philosopher Locke maintained, and as the framers of the American
Constitution believed. Property is a legal instrument of oppression. And
there is class warfare.

Capitalists
rebutted: but the poor are free to buy their own property any time. Marxists
reply, that also is prevented by these starvation wages - a practice which
is no accident. It is deliberately in the capitalists’ interest to keep a
large supply of people poor, desperate and willing to work dirt cheap. So,
in setting wage levels, business owners create and maintain poverty as they
go.

Poverty is also powerlessness. Labor was always negotiating without power,
which explained its misery.

Marx was an energetic writer and he used words like “theft” and
“embezzlement” to describe employers taking what their employees made. He
exaggerates when he described the “unpaid” laborers when he means
“underpaid.” But Marx also said: all this has got to change. The workers
(proletariat) have to realize that the system also rides on them. Without
the workers it collapses. So the workers should seize power.

Which led to revolutions. Last century, entire national social structures
were overturned. Because Marx’s points were clear. They show that the less
the workers are paid, the greater the success of business owners. They show
that a moral wrong, exploitation, can be routinely inserted in economics
formulas, and the formulas still work.

Modern Additions

Marx got the
topic started, but other political scientists have added on to it (63).

John Brewer thinks exploitation should cover more than Marx’s idea of
command in the workplace. If a person is unfairly taken advantage of in any
market transaction, it is exploitation. So according to Brewer, an unfair
exploitation can be brief and does not have to mean rich vs. poor.
Exploitation involves a person receiving lack of just deserts (64).

R. J. van der
Veen adds that exploitation is not just a feature of capitalism. It is just
as possible for exploitation to occur under socialism and communism if the
state commands the individual which work to do, pays him what the state
thinks he needs, and if he winds up mistreated and not free to exit (65).

Robert Goodin
states that behind the whole notion of exploitation is the expectation in a
civilized society that we practice fair play. It’s alright to go for
advantage against others who are roughly equal. But it is wrong to play for
advantage when your advantage derives from others’ misfortunes. Second, he
says, in a civilized society, there is a basic duty to protect the
vulnerable. Exploitation is violating this duty (66).

Ancient

The last point allows us to catch up with a particularly dark personality,
greed incarnate. This employer thinks he is his money. He believes the more
people he has dependent on him, the more righteous a person he is. So he
employs a lot of people and wants to hear all their gratitude. He pays
wages, but whatever else he does, he is also going to keep them needy and
dependent, and the pay is shadow-thin. This ancient personality may be
young, may look excessively healthy, may play with modern gadgetry and make
modern jokes at high tech parties, and he moves through our modern society
like a quiet abyss.

Varieties of Fear

Most people think there is no fear in the contemporary workplace. Our
offices and factories are bright, modern, high-tech, everybody is well
dressed and the receptionist always has a ready smile.

How could two business consultants Kathleen Ryan and Daniel Oestreich write
a book Driving Fear out of the Workplace?(67).
Because the authors have interviews and survey data from their work in 22
modern business organizations showing fear is common. True, American
employees are not afraid of being slugged, ambushed in the restroom or
assaulted in the parking lot unless they work as teachers in inner city
schools. But in the nation’s factories and office buildings there is fear of
other varieties. And most workers are not afraid of the customers or
clients. The source of their fear is supervisors and managers.

Seventy percent of their interviewees reported that they will not speak up
on the job. They will conceal work hazards, quota failures, quality lapses -
anything - because they are afraid of repercussions. What kind of
repercussions? Depending on the firm and the manager, anything from refusal
to answer and glaring eye-contact (“the look”), to public criticisms, to
yelling, insults, threats, tantrums, demotion, being written up as a whiner
or troublemaker, to loss of the job. The result is that when managers call
workers in to meetings to ask for feedback, or reports, or policy sessions,
the workers sit around the table in frigid silence - pure anxiety.

Ulcer

Ryan and Oestreich’s analysis shows the more fear there is in a company, the
less it is talked about. In Chris Argyris’s words, fear seems to be
self-sealing. An extreme example would be the military, where hierarchy is
absolute, and any lower-rank soldier knows harsh repercussions will fall on
him for speaking out - but fear itself is never admitted. Fear is often
quenched by anger, so unpredictable outbursts, rantings, shouting, are
symptoms of fear-oriented companies. Third, they say, the more fear-based an
organization, the more it will make claims to be efficient, systematic and
rational - it defines any emotion as irrelevant, so fear is denied or
ignored. Still other companies treat fear as an externality. (Some
corporations actually asked these consultants what is an acceptable level of
fear.)

Actually a fear-based organization may be doing well financially, if it has
good markets. But other things being equal, these authors say, fear loses
you profits. Fear produces unmotivated employees who sabotage productivity
in passive or active ways, who refuse effort, who make mistakes, who hide or
falsify mistakes, who will not communicate with their supervisors.

Other symptoms are slow to appear. Some effects of fear are gradually
accumulating. Threats and insults may make employees work harder in the
short run but in the long run will produce absenteeism, loss of creativity,
depression, sleeplessness, crying, tension, ulcers and illness. These are
very difficult to reverse. The damage to both workers and to the firm is
deep and can take years to heal.

Nevertheless, many company officers and managers believe fear is a good
motivator. Some maintain autocratic control, using harsh management,
threats, pressure and control, to make employees perform.

Self-interest

How does this all start? Ryan and Oestreich’s theory says in the beginning
management assumes that workers operate from a philosophy of self-interest.
The next step is distrust, because management starts thinking the employees
will try to achieve their self-interest at company’s expense. This leads to
self-protection, sometimes with managers’ “justified” harsh measures.
Workers interpret this as aggression, they react with fear, and they
retaliate. A cycle is started. It will escalate.

The basic formula is that assumptions of self-interest eventually lead to
fear.

Naturally in
fear-based groups, there is no trust. Instead, owners and managers
aggressively demand loyalty.

The therapeutic
goal is to reestablish trust in the organization. This is not easy. Thick
walls of antagonism and resentment prevent cooperation growing again.

Naive

Ryan and Oestreich’s points are clear enough. But they are naïve when they saying
that management starts out by “adopting” this assumption of self-interest.
Actually, management has little choice. Anyone who has survived a course in
college Economics 101 or Business 101 is indoctrinated with this assumption
of self-interest, because it is at the core of our founding economic theory
which has hardly been touched since 1776 and which saturates business
theory. Any manager who has been to school considers it straight thinking.

Many-footed

Which puts a
new contour on things.

If the
assumption of self-interest leads to fear, then Adam Smith’s theory, which
rests on self-interest, is responsible for spreading vast amounts of fear,
for eons, for miles, and into the depths of the spirit of the workaday
world. And the many-footed formulas of economists do not change that. Anyone
who employs other people and uses these assumptions to maximize profits is a
promoter of these vile “externalities.” Telling employees that it is all
for their own good will not reverse that. The employer protesting that he is
uplifting the community by bringing in business, manufacturing and sales
does not reverse it. If we believed those protests, we would have to believe
that fear is uplifting for business and uplifting for everybody’s life, and
so, ultimately is patriotic.

In these worksite descriptions democracy looks remote.

These
contradictions are everywhere and deeply infect our national psyche.

If you want to
remove all the fear, you’ll first have to change the overarching Adam Smith
theory.

Bragging

I have readers here who do not believe there is fear in the workplace. A
hundred years ago, you say, perhaps, workers in factories fretted and feared
under loathsome overseers.

The following description is from last year’s newspaper. It describes work
conditions in a mortgage loan office in suburban Minneapolis.
Sales employees work the phones hour after hour. They sit in rows of
cubicles. They are cold-calling, trying to find house-buyers to sign up for
mortgages. The company owner is a billionaire. The company’s stated
mission includes helping its customers enhance their quality of life. And
what is it like working inside the walls of the company’s offices? – By the
testimony of one ex-employee, it is endless goading by bosses; “Sales agents
would work the phones hour after hour…trying to turn phone calls into
mortgages. The demands were relentless: one manager prowled the aisles
between decks like ‘a little Hitler,’ hounding agents to make more calls and
push more loans, bragging that he hired and fired people so fast that one
worker would be cleaning out his desk as his replacement came through the
door.” Another employee from the same office: “[Its managers] really are all
about making the dollar and dealing with the consequences later.” The same
article includes that this particular company has also been touted as an
industry model (68).

Abuse

These managers aren’t waiting for the theories of Darwin to explain that
injustice is in the nature of things. They are taking things into their own
hands.

Of course, the
workers are always free to leave.

But what if we
don’t have the money to pay our debts? We are legally obliged to pay our
debts. So that freedom fades.

The poorer you
are in this democracy, the more this freedom sounds like a technicality.

Or perhaps we
self-delude. Our desire for freedom sometimes leads us to see things the way
we want, somewhat along these lines by poet Fernando Pessoa: “Inside the
coop where he’ll stay until he’s killed, the rooster sings anthems to
liberty because he was given two roosts.”(69)

If Adam Smith was right, then all the people in this nation who don’t like
their work are maximizing their happiness by choosing between the dread of
no income or the dread of endlessly going in to work they despise. This is a
slender improvement in happiness. Both choices inhabit the region of fear.
It is a strange political economy we have that stands on this slender ledge
and yells, “freedom!”

Millions of the undereducated, poor, or vulnerable do unending menial jobs,
and are told they can follow their life dreams, and told they can rise, when
they never have the power. Millions of Americans struggle and suffer trying
to make ends meet and find themselves diverted for life, paying debts.

And will abused workers leave?

Heresy

This
psychological research is haunting.

Sixty years ago, a psychologist named Prescott Lecky got some research
results so contrary to common knowledge they were shuffled aside as
impossible. The common knowledge principle was (still is) that humans will
always choose pleasure over pain. Lecky found people suffering with low
self-concepts are the exception; they seek confirmation of their low belief
in themselves - which is to say, given a choice, they will rather be in the
company of a person who puts them down.

In 1945 this little bit of heresy expired quickly and psychology pushed
ahead believing people with low self-concepts should all the more hungrily
seek reward and pleasure. Lecky’s findings were junked.

But fifteen years ago William Swann and his colleagues decided to give the
idea another shot. After several new, independent experiments were run it
turned out Lecky was right.

A typical experiment goes like this (they vary in detail). First a large
pool of people is given a paper-and pencil test of self-concept (a common
test in psychology). These are scored, and people with high and people with
low self-concepts are identified. Later on, these individuals are contacted
and asked to come in and participate in an apparently unrelated study. When
each one comes in, he is asked to sit down and write a personal essay about
himself, about a page. Next, a person he’s never seen before comes in the
room. He comes over, picks up the essay. He reads it, and either exclaims
(depending on the flip of a coin just before he came in the door), Well I
can see from your essay you’ve got a great personality, honest, intelligent,
popular – or – Well I can see from your essay you’re not so great, not very
bright, unpopular, also a phony. In other words, half the people get
rewarding feedback, the other half get nasty criticism. Now comes the main
point in the experiment. All of the essay writers are asked how much more
time they would like to spend with the person who read their essay. Results?
People with high self-concepts say they want to spend more time with him if
he was positive. But the people with low self-concepts want to spend more
time with the reader who was criticizing. It appears they choose more pain
over pleasure. Apparently, more important than pleasure is to be with
somebody who verifies the way you see yourself. “Yeah, that’s pretty close
to the way I am,” and “He sums up pretty close to the way I feel,” were
typical explanation for the choices of people who felt low about themselves.
This effect is especially marked in depressed people (70,71,72 ).

Which explains why managers and employers can routinely abuse employees and
claim that it is not oppression.

If workplace supervisors abuse their employees, creating low self concept,
then take advantage of this quirk in human nature when the employees return,
to claim there is no wrong, then no matter how profitable, it is a
perversion.

Conspiracy

I’ve avoided the topic of race. Race has been, and still is, a chronic
source of debilitating problems. But we are conditioned to think about
social problems in terms of race, so for instance, when we read “underclass”
we reflexively think, inner city blacks. Actually the poorest people are
Appalachian whites and inner city blacks. They are the lowest class, but
Americans have been discouraged from using class to understand anything
(Noam Chomsky says if you talk about social class they label you a
conspiracy theorist (73)).

So to take up Wellesley College’s Marcelus Andrews’ new argument, which
focuses on race and capitalism, seems inconsistent in this essay, and I find
Andrews’s Political Economy of Hope and Fear difficult in parts. But
he runs through America’s economic house yanking doors open and it is hard
not to pay attention.

Goad

Andrews: For hundreds of years we have assumed race and poverty go together
(poor equates with ‘other races’) so we may be surprised to learn that
today, the largest group of very poor people in America are whites; and
their numbers are increasing. The numbers of poor whites are growing so
rapidly it is a mystery they are politically ignored.

Poor people of all races now have little chance of ever making it up to the
middle class - for a complex of reasons including economic: the loss of jobs
as capitalism goes global; technological: the sudden demands of computer
skills at work; and attitude: Americans are really unsure if they want to
provide equality of opportunity, because they believe a market economy
thrives better on inequality.

Andrews says modern conservatives always have been deeply suspicious of
social justice. They are openly opposed to welfare programs. They are going to
let poverty be a goad.

Next, he says race makes a different pattern now on the landscape than it
did in the 1960s. Blacks have more than proved themselves capable, as many,
released from the old Jim Crow laws, have climbed and 75% of black families
are not poor any more, but the lagging 25% are in a predicament shared by
very poor whites. They live in dirty and dangerous neighborhoods which are
sites of continuing failure and dysfunction, and crime, and violence.

Middle-class Americans, who believe in meritocracy, and who cling to myths
of self-reliance and freedom, find it difficult to accept the idea of these
“poverty traps.” Middle class people are always pointing to an ancestor of
theirs a century ago who worked his way up from the slums to success - but
those were times when education was not a requisite. With today’s
technology, a poor education really is a suffocating disability. And that is
what the poor get in these neighborhoods. But that is interpreted as the
free market.

With selling drugs and selling sex always an alternative, the poor inhabit
the underside of the same free market where there is misery and death. The
rest of America, believing its system of meritocracy should be universally
applied, accepts that fate as the penalty for lack of ability, education and
willingness to work.

Camps

Andrews continues. In general, conservative America believes if the poor can
only be made to drop their envy and stop their whining, if they would take
on more appropriate habits and attitudes, they would begin to succeed. They
believe the poor are behaving badly.

Hearing that feelings of despair and inferiority are unequally distributed
does not move conservatives. Under meritocracy, it is just deserts. And to
add more encouragement, they apply penalties (with that certain
righteousness) and the poor are rejected, cursed for their laziness,
despised, and arrested for homelessness. That creates fear, because in fact
they cannot leave - first because the poor are discriminated against, just
as blacks are - and second, they are not all free to leave their
failure behind because of the nature of meritocracy. Meritocracy is a system
in which some must fail.

Resentment and hostility boil in the underclass, which the rest of society
dreads and sends in police with nightsticks (“punishment is by its very
nature the deliberate use of public power to inflict pain on offenders”) and
the feelings and the alienation only grow worse.

I could use the milder word and say anxiety is a persistent part of the
lower reaches of the economy. It is better to be honest and call it by its
real name: fear.

I am not arguing the poor are colonized by wealthy employers and lenders in
the market system of work-and-debt, but if I wanted to make that argument,
there is plenty of ammunition. Our economy runs on a good deal of fear,
including fear-of-consequences, which is missing from current economic
theory. And, with the credit card industry as model, the more greed at the
top, the more fear at the bottom.

Some people turn their eyes. Others actually prefer it that way.

It is in the
interest of our economy, at least of the top rungs of business, to maintain
this anxiety.

Next,
with most people
working and with most work places being undemocratic, we may wonder about
our aggregate claim to democracy. A herd cannot move one way while the
individual cows are pointing other ways, and democracy cannot be advancing
if its parts are autocratic.

We don’t have
equality. Preserving what freedom and what justice we have will take eternal
vigilance.

Fear does to a nation what it does to a business. It may be a short term
motivator. But in the long run, fear is debilitating. It is an enzyme of
decomposition and dissolution.

Even when Darwinists say fear and hierarchy are unavoidable parts of a
dog-eat-dog world, we can press for justice. We always have. We have been
fighting injustice, and winning sometimes, as long as we’ve existed and we
should not let the authority of science shut us up.